Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- You need to get out.
Help me get this reporter out of here!
I need some muscle over here!
♪ ♪
- Keep doing it! [shouting indistinctly]
[cheers and applause]
♪ ♪
- You know, this is all very personal to me
'cause I experienced tyranny at a very young age.
Israel sent me into the Soviet Union
when I was 21 years old
'cause I knew Russian and Hebrew,
and I was sent in to smuggle out the names of Jews
that I would find in the Soviet Union
and to smuggle in religious items and so on.
And I really experienced what most people in the West
have never, ever experienced:
life under a totalitarian regime.
[grand music]
♪ ♪
[somber music]
In order to keep myself sane, I would make myself laugh.
So, in my Moscow hotel, which I knew was bugged--
And how did I know? It's very simple.
They didn't allow any Soviet citizen
to stay in the same hotel as a Westerner.
So I would sing from the Psalms.
It says, "They have false gods.
"They have ears that don't hear, eyes that don't see,
but people still bow down to them."
[singing in Hebrew]
♪ ♪
- I think somewhere a cantor just killed himself.
- A few cantors. I think one is understating it.
- Everyone says, "Why are you friends with Dennis Prager?
You have nothing in common."
[laughter] As if, if our moms' first names
were both Connie,
we'd be simpatico on every topic.
He comes from the East. I come from the West.
He comes from religion. I come from atheist/pagan.
He comes from college and knowledge.
I come from tomfoolery and sports,
but yet we both share a little something
called common sense and values,
and the common sense and values--
I think this may be the chance for this country.
Common sense and values should trump everything.
It should trump LGBT. It should trump Chicano.
It should trump black. It should trump Trump.
That's all we should be focused on,
is common sense and values.
[applause]
This is the place I'd always kind of dreamt of
when I was a kid.
The houses I grew up in did not have garages,
and I always wanted cars and go-karts and mini bikes and--
Well, I wanted a basketball hoop.
I wanted a dog. I wanted dinner. I wanted a whole bunch of stuff.
[smooth music]
♪ ♪
I found out very early what could happen to somebody
if you got a free house, a couple of food tickets,
and just a stipend from the government,
that it was debilitating.
My mom was never forced to go out and take care of business,
and I said to her once, sort of from the mouth of babes,
"Why don't you just get a job?
"You get a job, we'll have a car.
"We could have a nice car instead of a junker.
We could get some furniture."
And she said, "If I get a job, I'll lose my welfare,"
meaning, "Use your head, boy."
♪ ♪
And I thought at that point-- I realized, not for me.
♪ ♪
- I'm a little embarrassed, because here's a guy
listening to my show for years,
and he's the most downloaded podcast in the world,
and I didn't know who he was?
- Adam Carolla and his partner, Julianne Hough.
[funky music]
♪ ♪
[cheers and applause]
- My name's Jimmy, and his name's Adam.
- The king is parched and grows weary.
Jester, bring forth a chalice of ale.
[cheers and applause]
Scamper away.
I don't want to live in a world
where Dennis Prager knows who I am.
The Dennis I enjoy is, he's just home.
He's reading the Torah, and he's smoking a cigar.
I don't want a Dennis Prager who goes,
"Hey, Ace Man, 'Man Show,'
'Crank Yankers,' love it."
- If somebody were able to pick
the two most opposite upbringings
in the United States of America,
they would take my upbringing and his upbringing.
I remember playing stickball in Brooklyn, where I grew up.
So some kid would say something, you know, unbelievably stupid,
and we'd all tell him, "Will you shut up?"
And he'd go, "Hey, it's a free country, man.
It's freedom of speech here."
And it basically shut us up. He's right.
What's happening now in the United States,
you are not to be heard on a college campus
or at your place of work.
This is brand-new.
This is one of the few things one could say
we have no precedent for in the United States.
- The real question is how long
before they come for your job and for my job--
I mean, for anyone who speaks for a living?
- They want to close us down.
No, in all seriousness, they do want to close us down.
- Don't you have a billion views on PragerU?
- We do; we had a billion views last year,
but the same thing's gonna happen to you.
Look, you're the most downloaded podcast,
to my knowledge, in the world, yeah.
- Yeah, I got a family. I got employees.
- We're not an enemy to goodness.
We're not an enemy to good things.
We're an enemy of the dogmatic.
- Dennis and I were gonna get together
and do an event at CSUN.
That's Cal State Northridge out here.
A little backstory-- my mother graduated CSUN
with a degree in Chicano studies,
so that's all you need to know about my mom and possibly CSUN.
- Never has a thesis been so confirmed so rapidly.
We were going to do an event, you and I.
- And we've done events there before.
- And we've done before.
And the subject was, essentially,
what is happening at our universities
in terms of intellectual openness, et cetera, et cetera?
They had fully approved you and me being there.
They then canceled it because of the topic.
It doesn't bother me for me.
It bothers me for this beloved country of mine.
It bothers me for the young people who are being deprived
of anything that could open their minds.
- So I have a vision of us as people, as human beings
that is interested not in what is different among us
but what is the same, okay?
So I believe, even though I'm not like you,
in the sense of my superficial appearance,
that I can sit down and talk to you and understand--
understand your predicament, that I can listen to you.
If that's not true, if you deny that,
then what is the reason that you ask to be heard?
Yes, thank you.
That I disagree with.
- No, no, no.
- I disagree. I disagree. - It's not a debate.
- I am sick looking at you.
I am disgusted watching Alex argue with you.
You are not listening! You are disgusting.
And now I want your job to be taken from you.
- People who have a great, sterling reputation at Yale,
"You know, you're old enough to decide
what Halloween costume you should use,"
and for that, it almost causes a riot at Yale,
and that's Yale.
- And I know last year on Halloween,
you went as Kevin Hart,
and that caused--
You don't know who Kevin Hart is.
- Well, I do vaguely,
but the point is, it's cultural appropriation no matter what.
- That is correct.
- We're on the way to the airport,
which is where I do much of my life, the airport.
You know, I go to all sorts of campuses,
from Berkeley to Columbia and everything in between.
So, you know, my hope is, it's Wyoming.
It's a pretty conservative state.
All will be peaceful and tranquil.
- It all began when students invited a special guest
to speak about socialism.
- Yeah, that's right, Aaron.
We were on campus tonight as hundreds lined up
to see Dennis Prager speak about his views,
but before he even arrived to campus,
other students who did not agree
tried to stop his appearance.
- We're essentially here because we don't agree
with Mr. Prager's views at all.
He has said many hurtful things
and hateful rhetoric towards underrepresented communities,
of which Wyoming has many beautiful, diverse communities.
- In the case of the University of Wyoming, it was precious.
"Dennis Prager, noted--" which was a compliment--
"Noted bigot,
racist, homophobe, sexist,
Islamophobe, and anti-Semite."
[laughter]
I swear to God.
So word got out to the person who clearly knew me well,
"It's probably worth dropping anti-Semite.
"The guy is a well-known Jew,
written books on Judaism, et cetera."
So they dropped that without a word of apology,
needless to say.
They just dropped it, but everything else remained.
- It's ironic that, you know, "The Los Angeles Times"
would call you bigoted, because what you do
is the opposite of bigoted, which is,
"I don't care who's listening.
I will simply speak the truth as I know it to you,"
versus a version that is meant for this color
and that group and the LGBT community.
Dennis is the most decent, moral person I've ever met,
and thus, he does not have this animus in his heart,
so he's able to be free to piss everyone off.
[laughter and applause]
- The only reason for the attack
is that I'm known as a conservative.
This is a brainwash that they undergo.
If you are conservative, then you are not wrong.
You are evil.
They have to think we're evil.
Otherwise they have to debate us.
all: Racist go home! Racist go home!
- The chaos centered around controversial conservative
Ben Shapiro.
- Values matter significantly more than melanin level.
Racial diversity doesn't mean anything.
Decency means something.
Diversity is not a bad thing, but it isn't a good thing
unless the people who are racially diverse
are also decent.
- Concerns over safety and threats
prompted University President William Covino
to cancel the preapproved speech,
but Shapiro continued with his scheduled appearance,
drawing dozens of protesters
who were desperate to stop him.
- Look at me. I mean, like,
do I look like a physical threat to anybody?
Last time I was in a fight, I was 14 years old.
I was two years younger than everybody else
in my high-school class,
and I was getting my ass kicked.
- When I went to college,
suddenly there were some folks
who didn't think at all like me.
I've heard some college campuses
where they don't want to have a guest speaker
who is too conservative.
all: Charles Murray, go away!
Racist, sexist, anti-gay!
- That's the free speech of the left.
- This is not an argument. This is a religion.
- When Professor Stanger was escorting Murray out,
she was left with a concussion and whiplash.
- Shouldn't we be able to agree on protecting free speech
no matter who is speaking?
- There will be resistance, and it will not be peaceful.
Resistance to violent hate speech
is not another act of hate.
It is an act of love.
- Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn't upset you?
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
[indistinct shouting]
all: Shut it down! Shut it down!
Shut it down!
[explosion, screaming]
- A protest has turned violent
at the University of California, Berkeley.
- Campus locked down as more than 1,000 people rallied
against the appearance of a controversial editor
from Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos.
- All I care about is free speech and free expression.
I want people to be able to be, do, and say anything.
- It's disgusting.
It's one thing to protest someone's right
to come here and speak,
but it's another thing to create
this much amount of destruction and violence
and hurt and harm other people.
- We need our voices heard, and if this is the way
that we think it must be done,
then I suppose that's what we got to do.
- It sends the message that under no means
will we allow any of this to go on anywhere near Berkeley.
- Has the birthplace of free speech
now become its graveyard?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- If there's a fundamental American right,
it's to say what's on your mind.
The idea that if you offend me,
you should not speak...
- To create a unsafe space here for all--
- I did not-- - Be quiet!
- Is so bizarre.
- What a lot of people don't get
and Americans get to take for granted
is that free speech is a very weird thing in human history.
Mostly, our instincts are, we don't like dissenters.
We prefer to behead them, set them on fire,
send them out of our village.
- Free speech is unique to the United States.
Lots of countries pretend to have it,
but they'll cut your head off for blasphemy in Saudi Arabia.
In Thailand they'll throw you in a prison
if you make fun of the king.
In Russia and China, you go to jail
if you say anything nice about gay people.
In Germany, you can't praise Nazis.
Sounds good, right? But maybe not.
Doesn't stop people from promoting Nazism in secret.
It just means you can't debate them in public.
France convicted Brigitte Bardot five times
for criticizing the practice
of animal sacrifice at a Muslim festival.
[sheep baas]
The U.K. convicted a comic
of a hate crime for teaching a pug
to do a Nazi salute.
Just over the border in Canada,
a Christian preacher was arrested for, wait for it,
preaching in public.
Pretty much everywhere else, cops can come to your house
and arrest you for a rant or a complaint
or even for making a joke.
The only reason they can't do it here
is because we have the First Amendment.
- The only reason why you have a First Amendment
is to protect the rights of minorities,
the rights of the oddball, the rights of the underdog.
Free speech battles on campus in the 1960s,
starting in Berkeley
and the Free Speech Movement in 1964,
were primarily about whether or not
you could have politics on campus,
and that was the start of the Free Speech Movement.
From 1964 on, it, you know, took over campuses
all over the country,
and I think it was so successful
that there was probably a perfect week in 1977
when free speech was protected on campus
at a level it never had been before and would be again,
probably right around the time "Star Wars" came out.
The phase that we're in right now
is the most distressing one.
Sometime around 2013, 2014,
the students themselves
started demanding new speech codes
or that people not be invited to speak,
or if they were invited, that they be disinvited.
- Both Condoleezza Rice and Christine Lagarde
had to withdraw themselves from giving speeches
at Rutgers and Smith Universities.
- That was when you first started hearing
about trigger warnings,
things like microaggression training.
- We're not sure if we even believe in freedom anymore.
Most universities today don't require classes in civics,
courses to know the fundamentals
of the Constitution.
Instead, we have classes on the things that divide us--
identity politics.
If we don't rediscover,
reclaim an understanding of the foundations
of our society, we're in jeopardy of losing it.
[light music]
- Whew, you sure got to be careful what you say nowadays
so people don't get offended.
Wow, I wonder who that little scrap of paper is.
- ♪ I'm the First Amendment, yes, the very First Amendment ♪
♪ And I'm found in the Bill of Rights ♪
♪ Well, it's a long, long time since my ink has dried ♪
♪ And a long, long time since my authors died ♪
♪ But I'm just as important today as I was back then ♪
♪ At least I hope I am ♪
♪ 'Cause I defend all your rights ♪
- Gee, First Amendment, you certainly sound important.
- Call me Firsty. I like to think I'm important,
but I'm not so sure anymore.
- How come people don't know more about you, Firsty?
- People tend to take me for granted,
but if it wasn't for me,
Americans wouldn't be able to say what they want to say.
- Oh, no. - Oh, yeah.
Sometimes when people speak their mind,
other people get offended.
I hope people remember why I'm important, or I may die.
- Die? - Yeah, die...
along with the rest of your freedoms.
♪ I'm the First Amendment, yes, the very First Amendment ♪
♪ Without me, you'd be living in China ♪
♪ In the Bill of Rights, I'm the leadoff hit ♪
♪ Read me in a museum or when you're sitting on the sh-- ♪
[tires screeching]
[gunfire]
both: Firsty! - [groans]
- Why? - [groaning]
both: No!
- Liberty is a value, not a natural inclination.
- Yeah, I love when I listen to Dennis's show and somebody says,
"Well, everyone yearns to be free."
- No. - And he says, "No."
- They yearn to be taken care of.
The greater yearning of the human species
is to be taken care of, not to be free.
The French Revolution and the American Revolution
are at war with one another.
Their motto was "Liberty, equality, fraternity."
That was not in our motto.
We have "Liberty, in God we trust, e pluribus unum...
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
They're different values,
and we have raised a generation
to believe that being taken care of
is more important than liberty.
49% of kids on campuses in America today,
according to Pew Research,
do not believe in free speech for hate speech.
You know how moronic that is?
The issue of free speech doesn't apply to love speech.
Nobody ever threatened love speech.
It's precisely the speech you hate or you find hateful
that needs to be protected, but this is unknown.
This is why we're fighting for the soul of America.
[applause]
[somber music]
So how many of you think people should be free in America
or on a university campus to say whatever they want?
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
How many of you think there should be restrictions
on what you can say on a campus?
One, two, three, four, five, six, so it's pretty much tied.
So no country in the world has had free speech
as much as this country.
In Europe, you can be arrested if you say things
that the government thinks is hateful.
Give me an example--
those of you who said that you think
there should be restrictions,
give me an example of what
should not be allowed to be said.
- I would say, like, if you have Nazi beliefs or values
and you raise those
because that can make people uncomfortable.
- Okay, that's very important.
So I'm a Jew, and Nazis killed six million Jews.
That's one out of every three Jews on Earth
was annihilated in World War II by the Nazis.
So I have a real hatred to Nazis,
but I believe they should be allowed
to march freely in America,
because if we say to the Nazi today, "You can't speak,"
then we'll say to a non-Nazi tomorrow,
"You can't speak either."
And we hope that if everybody speaks,
the good ideas will win.
- Free speech is one of the greatest innovations
in human history.
It's how we figured out how to have peaceful,
pluralistic societies
that are endlessly creative and free.
Free speech done correctly
is one of the most exciting experiences
you can have in your life.
Throw anything out there. We'll question anything.
Let's figure stuff out. It's absolutely thrilling.
And I also think that it's incredibly fragile.
If I thought that free speech would just be something
that could defend itself,
I wouldn't be as worried about it,
but humans don't really like freedom of speech.
They like to say they like it.
They definitely like their own freedom of speech.
They don't necessarily like
your freedom of speech that much.
- So we had an attorney write CSUN a letter.
You folks, you have a charter which says
that there's free speech on your campus.
So they had no choice.
- So we're coming back, and we're saying whatever we want.
- Exactly.
So here is exhibit A
of a man who was raised with white privilege.
- Oh, yes.
I got into a semi-heated debate with a black fella
who was on public radio,
and he went on to explain to me,
I didn't know what I was talking about
because of my white privilege.
And I said, "Well, let's examine my white privilege,
may we?"
I did not go to college. I worked cleaning carpets.
Later on, I worked on construction sites,
not as an apprentice or a carpenter, but as a laborer--
digging ditches, mostly cleaning up garbage.
Whatever work donkeys were qualified to do,
that's what I did.
At a certain point, when I felt like my white privilege
wasn't kicking in at all... [laughter]
Mom was on food stamps and welfare,
Dad was eking out a living
and had no extra money or time for anybody else,
I said, "You know what would be a good job for me?
Fireman. I'm strong. I'm eager for the fray.
I have no qualms about my personal safety,
and I think I would make a good fireman.
Plus, I love chili.
I love playing foosball, and as far as I could tell,
when they're not putting out fires,
they're eating chili and playing foosball,"
So I just walked over there, and I said,
"I'm gonna put in an application to be a fireman,"
and they said, "Fine." I filled it out.
I handed it to the guy, and the guy said,
"Don't hold your breath."
And I said, "What does that mean?"
And he said, "We're not gonna be getting to you
for some years."
And when you're 19 and you're destitute
and your stepmom's trying to extricate you
from the garage you're living in
and you have no job or no real income,
the notion of "We'll call you in six or seven years"
is not a buoy you cling to.
And sure enough, I moved out of the house.
I was about 25, 26, five, six years
into my carpentering career.
My dad showed up to my apartment one day,
and he had a letter, and he said,
"It's from the L.A. Fire Department."
And sure enough, there was a date to take the written test
the following weekend.
And I said, "I don't even want to be a fireman anymore,
but because I've waited six years to be a fireman,
I'm going down to Hollywood High
on 10:00 a.m. on Saturday."
And I stood in line.
There was a young lady, very diminutive lady,
a small, slightly built lady behind me,
could not tell her nationality.
Could have been black, Latino, or mixed
or something like that.
Everyone around me-- I kept saying,
"When did you put in your application?
When did you put it in?"
I turned around to her, and I said,
"When did you put in your application?"
And she said, "Tuesday."
[laughter]
- A safe space is a place you can go to
where it's safe to do whatever you want.
You can just be yourself, and no one's gonna say
or do anything that makes you uncomfortable.
- There's this myth that when you're in a safe space,
all you do is sing "Kumbaya" or something.
The reality is, it's when you feel safe
that you have some of the most important
transformative discussions,
at least I do when I'm in my safe spaces.
- Once you go beyond college,
you're gonna have uncomfortable experiences,
but to kind of force yourself through pain
and difficult experiences is totally unnecessary.
- See, I never went to college.
I was a builder,
but I always thought college was this place for ideas.
And now it's turned into a place
for some ideas but not other ideas,
and that seems to fly in the face of ideas in general.
- For a generation that demands safe spaces,
that equates ideas they don't like to actual physical battery
and requires trigger warnings for class assignments
that might be upsetting, there's a name--snowflakes.
- We're creating this environment
where liberals and leftists and progressives on campuses
think that they need to get government authority
or university authority to protect their ears
from stuff that they don't like
or stuff that's actually offensive
or that is racist or that is sexist or that is horrible,
and I just think that that's a very dangerous view.
- I'm saying this not for conservatives.
I'm saying this for liberals.
They have been bubble-wrapped in academia for 40 years.
- When you try to create a safe space
in which it's difficult to be unsettled, unnerved,
you reinforce walls,
which makes it difficult for you to cultivate the capacity
to learn from other people,
especially people you disagree with.
- Can I just say, it feels really nice
to live in a bubble for a little while.
You feel safe. You feel protected.
You feel like everyone agrees with you and you're right.
- ♪ If you do not like me ♪
you are not allowed in my safe space ♪
all: ♪ My safe space ♪
- ♪ Look and you will see ♪
♪ There's a very select crowd in your safe space ♪
all: ♪ My safe space ♪
- ♪ People that support me ♪
♪ Mixed in with more people that support me ♪
♪ And say nice things, rainbows all around me ♪
♪ There is no shame in my safe space ♪
- ♪ My safe space ♪
- No university should ever create
a safe space for an idea.
If you want to feel good, get a massage.
- I want every student on campus to be physically safe.
I don't want anybody getting beat up.
I don't want anybody getting sexually assaulted or molested.
I don't want anybody singled out for, you know, threats,
but if you mean emotionally safe or intellectually safe,
I don't know why you're in college,
because the whole point is that you're going to leave soon,
and I want you to be offended every single day.
all: ♪ Social Justice Warriors1♪
♪ Get triggered ♪
both: Bias Response Team, go!
all: ♪ Social Justice Warriors ♪
- We've gotten to a point where,
if you say you're tolerant all the time,
if you talk about diversity all the time
and tolerance all the time,
people somehow think that means you are tolerant
and you care about diversity,
and in almost every case almost without fail,
today that's actually the reverse.
So right now it's very in for everyone on the left
to talk about tolerance and diversity and all these things,
and what is the type of diversity that they hate?
Well, the type of diversity that they hate
is diversity of thought.
- Dave Rubin has every credential
of a bona fide liberal.
I mean, Dave Rubin is gay. Dave Rubin is married to a man.
Dave Rubin is a lifelong Democrat.
- When I talk about liberalism, what is liberalism,
and how is it different than leftism?
Liberalism really is about the individual,
and it's about live and let live.
It's not just this amorphous idea of tolerance,
which is what leftism is.
That's a collectivist view of the world,
where we should be grouping all of these people
and we should be taking from some and giving to others,
and it is a snake that will eat its own tail.
- You are a liberal. - I am.
- We obviously have different politics,
but it doesn't matter.
On freedom of speech we are completely united.
Do you feel right now, ideologically,
your biggest enemy are conservatives or the left?
- Oh, there's no question.
A, my biggest enemy is the hard left.
B, the hard left poses a far greater danger
to the American future than the hard right.
I'm not worried about a few dozen people with swastikas...
- Thank you. - Who want to replace
the Jews 'cause they're our past.
They have no resonance on university campuses today.
- Right. - But the hard, hard left
anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity,
intolerance for speech, these are our leaders.
When I used to teach 150 students
in my first year of criminal law,
I'd look around, and I'd say, "Future president,
"future chief justice,
"future editorial director of 'The New York Times,'
future managing partner of Goldman Sachs."
They're our future.
- What's happened to this place?
Ah!
[suspenseful music]
[gasps]
♪ ♪
Ah!
♪ ♪
This was the home of ruthless media disrupter
Samuel F. B. Morse.
Who's his successor, that fellow?
- Fellow? That word is cisgender normative, okay?
You're worse than Hitler!
- Too late for flattery.
I'm not giving this school a dime.
- I've seen, over the past 30 years,
how the university has changed and not for the better.
Now they don't tolerate the other side's viewpoint,
and there are no conservatives that are speaking out.
If you're conservative at this university, good luck.
First of all, I don't know how--
you're not gonna get hired.
I don't know what department's gonna hire you
at what college it's gonna hire you at.
You're not gonna get promoted.
There's no way that you're gonna be accepted
by your fellow faculty,
and I'm telling you right now,
they're gonna figure out a way to get rid of you.
I mean, they will figure out some means
by whatever hook and crook.
They'll never say it's because of your political orientation,
but they're gonna get rid of you.
This is also something of an irony, but it's also really--
I think it's kind of dangerous
that there's only one worldview now
that's allowable in the university,
and if you don't have that, you better be quiet.
- You must think like we think and do what we do,
and if you don't, you're verboten.
You're unwelcome. You can't even speak here.
You can't teach here. You can't attend here.
How in the world can we possibly argue
that this is academic freedom?
It is ideological fascism.
You must be one of us, or you're unwelcome.
- Is it hard to be a conservative at Berkeley?
Yeah, sometimes.
- My name's Isabella Chow.
I'm a third-year student at UC Berkeley
studying business and music.
In spring 2018, I was elected to student senate at Berkeley.
There's a bill proposed to our student senate
that I felt like I couldn't fully vote for
because of my Christian beliefs
and because I represented
the Christian community on campus.
And so I abstained from voting on that bill that night,
and I gave a short statement of why I abstained,
and the backlash was swifter and bigger
than what I would have ever imagined.
- Senator Chow! all: Resign now!
- There were hundreds of students that came in
and protested the fact that I was still a senator
and demanded my resignation.
- Tonight is not about dismissing Christianity
as universally toxic,
but about validating the experience of those
at the hands of bigots who have cowardly hid behind religion
to justify their actions.
- Sitting there was really hard.
It was just difficult to hear the accusations
of people calling me a bigot, calling me a hater.
I hoped that there would be dialogue.
I hoped that there would be
mutual respect and understanding.
- When trans people are under attack, what do we do?
all: Stand up, fight back!
- At this point, I've been disaffiliated
with every organization
that I had a working relationship with
and voted out of clubs that I've been in,
like, even since freshman year,
but I wasn't elected to not listen to my conscience,
and I wasn't elected to not represent
a religious voice on campus,
even if that voice is a minority here at Berkeley.
- I've been assaulted on my campus.
- You were assaulted?
- The night after the election, yes.
- You were physically assaulted? - Physically assaulted.
I was walking back from a meeting that I had,
and the assumption was that someone followed me
out of a building, knew where I was
'cause I had that meeting every single week at that time,
and someone came up to me and said, you know,
"F you, racist B-word, you support a racist party,"
and just threw me down the hill.
- Was anyone prosecuted for it?
- No. - Mm-hmm.
- This is what they've tricked everybody into thinking.
You know, years ago it was you were a racist
and you were a bigot.
Then it became Nazis.
Now it's white supremacists, or sometimes it's Nazis,
and they'll always ramp this thing up.
- I've been called a white supremacist.
I've been called a Nazi.
You know, what's crazy about calling someone a Nazi--
that term is so malleable these days--
is you can reduce them to a, you know, inhuman form,
and you can justify punching them or attacking them, even.
- You're not videoing me.
- All right, well, we're in public.
So I'm just gonna video it for my own safety
'cause you seem really erratic.
- You are [bleep] encouraging violence.
- No, I'm not.
[objects clatter]
- Get your [bleep] phone out of my face, mother[bleep].
Get your phone out of my [bleep] face.
[bleep] you. [bleep] you.
- Oh, [bleep].
- "The Dennis Prager Show" returns in five seconds.
[dramatic music]
- I want to ask you something 'cause you're so
on top of the situation on campuses.
Right now if you had to grade freedom of speech on campuses
versus two years ago,
would you say it's getting worse,
it's the same, awful, or what?
- So what's happening is that there's a student population
that has been silenced,
that has been ostracized for their beliefs and their views.
Make no mistake, it's not just the free speech laws
and the free speech zones, but it's the culture.
This is what's so important.
It's what is culturally allowed to be said
and not allowed to be said.
- I grew up during the McCarthy period
when it was the extreme right at Brooklyn College
which told me I had no right to express my views,
and it was the liberals that were demanding free speech
and the conservatives that were trying to deny it.
Today it's flipped.
- My name is Chevy Swanson.
I'm the president of the College Republicans
here at the University of Washington.
We wanted to invite Joey Gibson
from Patriot Prayer
to come do a freedom rally.
We expected about, maybe 100 people at most
in the middle of out central area on campus,
Red Square--ironically named.
Protesters started making posts on social media,
saying they were gonna come protest,
and the school ramped up security on us,
telling us that because we invited a speaker
that made the protesters mad
that we had to pay every cent of security
caused by the protesters.
At first, that was $17,000,
and that's a bill we got a week before the event-
an impossible bill to pay.
- We were forced to spend $10,000 in security.
- The day after I submitted my application,
they changed the rule
to now where if your security costs more than $1,000,
you must make up the difference.
- So they interrupt conservatives,
and then conservatives have to foot the bill?
- The College Republicans are actually
under investigation right now--
you know, causing all these riots
because of the speakers we bring in.
- You're causing the riots? - Yeah, so...
- Not the rioters?
- Ann Coulter's visit to UC Berkeley
isn't for another month,
but student organizers of the event
say they are nervous.
- Do I support what happened at the Milo Yiannopoulos event?
Yes, I do, and what we're saying this time is
we need to come out again,
and we need to come out in bigger numbers.
- Okay, let me ask you a question here.
Let's just say that Rachel Maddow
was scheduled to speak at Cal.
And let's say that people on the far right
were really angry about that.
They did not want her to speak, and they came out,
and they protested, and they were violent,
and they kept Rachel Maddow from speaking.
How would you feel then?
- I'm trying to picture that actually happening.
- Campus police Captain Alex Yow
says police simply could not guarantee
that Coulter's originally planned speech would be safe.
- We're hiding in the airport in a baseball cap.
[chuckles] That is exactly where we are.
They are fascists.
They don't want another point of view.
I mean, I've been doing these college speeches
for more than a decade.
- On the Berkeley campus,
College Republicans are fighting
to give Coulter a platform this week.
They filed a lawsuit Monday
trying to force the university to ease restrictions
they say are only placed on conservative speakers.
- I think it's important to call that what it is,
which is essentially just shredding the Constitution,
or in a way that we see happen a lot
at Young America's Foundation
when we're working with students on their campuses,
is this is the classic argument that leftists will use
in order to shut down conservative speech.
- Security is the new "Shut up,"
because by the time you factor in all the security costs,
you could stage "Hello Dolly Meets Godzilla on Ice"
for the same cost as bringing Charles Murray in
to give a 20-minute speech to a few students.
- I don't even-- I'm perplexed, even,
that people could even say,
"Oh, it's not an issue."
It's, like, one of the biggest issues in America today,
that the place that is supposed to be
a place of ideas, the university,
is the most closed place in the United States.
It's very important for people to understand
that this is not just affecting conservatives.
Liberals are being shut down.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- I considered myself a leftist.
♪ ♪
I was a teaching assistant for Communication Studies 101.
I wanted my students to comprehend
how grammar could actually be a big issue in our society.
To demonstrate this point, I brought in a clip
from TV Ontario.
So this is the province's public broadcaster.
And in the particular clip I showed,
it was Professor of Transgender Studies
Nicholas Matte,
and he was talking to Professor Jordan Peterson
from the University of Toronto.
- And your attempts to regulate my language use and--
- I don't care about your language use.
I care about the safety of the people who are being harmed.
- I know. People who make your kinds of arguments
are always concerned with other people's safety.
- I want to have really deep discussions
about all sorts of issues,
and I don't think anything should be off-limits.
And that is today what makes you an evil person.
When I showed the clip in my class, I did not take a stance.
I was neutral.
I treated Peterson's argument
just as valid as Matte's argument,
but that was the problem.
It was a problem that I was neutral.
I was just genuinely very confused,
because to me, the university is a place
where you can question anything.
♪ ♪
- Dr. Jordan Peterson refuses to be pigeonholed.
His new self-help book, "12 Rules for Life,"
is already a best seller.
Hundreds of thousands subscribe
to his online lectures.
His speeches regularly attract protests.
- I'm not arguing about your rights.
- And his new speaking tour is selling out.
- I think he's dangerous because of the sorts of people
that he enables.
- It's quite the place you've got here.
So tell me about this one.
- It's a really nicely built car.
- Mm-hmm.
Hardly looks like it's ever been driven.
- It's been very well taken care of, unlike its owner.
- Oh, yeah? - Yeah, I've been put away wet.
So are they gonna pass a law in Canada outlawing pronouns?
- Oh, it's already passed.
If you're an advocate of free speech,
which you are if you're an advocate of freedom,
then you still might say, "Okay, well, there are limits.
Some of them are illegal. I can't incite violence.
I can't incite someone to a crime,"
you know, and that's already illegal,
so there are limits of that sort.
This is different.
This is the law insisting that you say something.
"You use my language," and my response was,
"There isn't a hope in hell
that I will ever use your language."
- Once you control the language, you control the outcome.
- Yeah, well, that's why I wouldn't say those words.
It's because that's exactly right.
As soon as I allow you to define the territory
in which we're going to engage, then you get to win.
- There's a reason that every time
one of these professors or TAs,
whether it's Lindsay Shepherd in Canada
or Bret Weinstein in Washington,
why are they all lefties
who then say one thing that upsets the left,
and then they're purged?
It will come for you.
I mean, if there is someone that's watching this right now
that is a hard-core progressive that's going,
"Man, I hate Prager and Rubin,
and this is all nonsense," guess what.
If you have any spark of individualism in you,
if you have anything about you that's interesting or different,
they will come to destroy that, too.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- You know, most people don't get to see
the thing that they love,
a system that has the potential to do great good in the world,
be destroyed from within.
♪ ♪
[line trilling]
- Dean's office. - It's Stacy Brown.
Is Steve around?
- Oh, he just walked in the door.
Hang on. - Thanks.
- Yeah.
- Stop telling people of color they're [bleep] useless.
You're useless. Get the [bleep]--
all: Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
Bret Weinstein has got to go!
Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
Bret Weinstein has got to go!
♪ ♪
- I think we did not see, effectively,
a coup in the institution coming,
and we didn't feel vulnerable to it
because we were both very popular among students
and we had the equivalent of tenure.
- Weinstein, who identifies as politically left,
had announced he was boycotting a decades-old event
created by students of color at the school.
- Day of Absence was a tradition on Evergreen's campus
from very nearly the founding of the college.
Day of Absence is named after a play by Douglas Turner Ward,
a black playwright,
and the premise of the play
is that in a fictional Southern town
the black population decides not to show up one day
in order to make the point to the white population
about the important role that they are playing.
Last year the committee that organizes the Day of Absence
announced in a faculty meeting--
a faculty meeting in which there was no opportunity
to ask any questions--
they announced that white people were being asked
to leave the campus for the day.
And it was so strange to hear that announced,
that I assumed I had misunderstood
what had been said,
and then the administration of the college made it clear
that they were strongly encouraging white people
not to come to school on that day
in an effort to "Center people of color."
I found this offensive.
This was not, as it was being portrayed,
a simple flip of the script
where instead of people of color,
it was white people this time.
This was people organizing this protest
telling others not to show up to a public college
on a particular day
because of the color of their skin,
which is anathema to me as a liberal,
so I said so.
There was a backlash over email.
My email went to the staff and faculty email list.
There were students who worked on campus
who were on that list, which I was aware of,
and I just simply said,
"This is unacceptable, and you can expect me
to be on campus on that day."
Tuesday, May 23rd of 2017,
I went to work.
I biked in as I always did.
I began teaching my morning class,
and a student who I knew pretty well from a past program
called me over a bit concerned and said,
"Do you know that there are people outside the door
chanting for you to be fired?"
And I said, "No, that's pretty odd."
What shocked me was that
they were not at all interested in that discussion.
If somebody who was the object of a protest
that we were participating in
wanted to talk to us about the nature of that protest,
I would have been right there.
So how is it that I was being protested
by people who weren't interested
in even engaging me on the question
and showing me that I might be wrong?
It would be weeks before I would understand why that was.
all: These racist teachers got to go!
Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
These racist teachers got to go!
Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
These racist teachers got to go!
Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
These racist teachers got to go!
- Protesters then engaged the president of the college
and got him to agree to a meeting.
I decided that I should be at that meeting.
If they were calling for my firing,
I wanted to be there to answer the charges.
I found a seat and sat down.
Within a couple of minutes,
there was an announcement by protesters,
who were clearly in complete charge of this meeting,
saying that the food and water that was available,
publicly supplied, were for people of color,
and that white people should not avail themselves
of those things.
That was the tenor of the meeting.
[cheers and applause]
- So I was here,
and I get this text from Bret, two of them, actually.
The first one says,
"They say I may not be allowed to leave."
The second one, "I'm not sure what to do."
And then silence.
I heard from one dean
before I knew anything about what had happened,
and that dean's concern
was that Bret not talk to the press.
That was the concern from the college,
that if any of the press came calling,
he should send them to college PR.
- At the end of the meeting, I was allowed to leave,
and I left the building with a number of my students,
and I was flanked by a number of other people
who wanted to talk to me for various reasons,
including one young woman
who I think in some ways
had not gotten the message that talking to me was not allowed.
The next day the protesters made a point
of bringing her to a rally
that they had organized on campus
and having her read a statement
that they had prepared publicly,
and it's heart-wrenching for me.
She read this statement, and she butchered it.
Reading out loud maybe in front of a group
was not in her skill set.
- Based on false, racially charged alleged--
allegations.
- They effectively humiliated her
in order to demonstrate that
they had recaptured her in some way.
- Whereas the college administration specific--
[mumbling] Sorry.
- There are a lot of moments that are
particularly telling from the protest,
but I must say, that is among the most chilling to me.
♪ ♪
- It's our students that are stopping people.
- Oh, our students that are stopping people.
Why aren't we stopping them from stopping people?
- Because the president has told Stacy to stand down.
- I biked this direction,
which to this point is my normal commute.
I saw people that I recognized
from the protest the day before.
They saw me,
and they appeared to start
doing something with their phones,
and I kept biking,
and then I realized, "That just doesn't feel right,"
and I took the next entrance into campus,
and I went to the police station, and I said,
"Here's what I think I experienced,
but I must be imagining it."
And she said, "I don't think you're imagining it.
"I think they're looking for you, and what's more...
"I can't protect you.
"You're not safe on campus,
and you're not safe anywhere in town on your bicycle."
♪ ♪
I think it's pretty clear what happened at Evergreen
is an extreme case,
and I've heard people dismiss it on that basis,
that it was just a very liberal campus
that went farther off the deep end than any other,
and I think that's really a mistake.
In some ways, Evergreen is a preview of what's coming.
The fact that this is happening
across so many campuses
means that it is going to spread
into every quadrant of society,
and things are going to get worse elsewhere.
So Evergreen is describing a future
that is rapidly approaching.
[explosion, siren wailing]
♪ ♪
- These ideas have sort of contaminated the campuses,
but how are they getting off the campus
and into the mainstream?
- Well, they're partly doing that
because the mainstream will be run
by the people who are on campuses,
but there's a more conspiratorial element
to it than that.
It's like, it's very important to remember
that the most politically correct disciplines
are producing activists.
That's their goal,
and so they have a stated goal of infiltrating organizations
and altering them in the politically correct direction.
- Once we've created an expectation,
that it's a nice thing to do to censor people
in an enlightened way, there's no reason to believe
that they're not gonna construct a world
that looks like that,
and that is not a good world for dissent.
That's not a good world for oddballs.
It certainly isn't a good world for comedians.
- Bill Belichick, the most confident coach
of all time, right?
Most coaches are like, "I want raw athletes,
raw talent, sheer athleticism."
And Belichick's like, "Yeah, that's cool. You got any Jews?"
[laughter]
Yeah, Jews, like, five, six Jews.
No, we got, like, 6'4" black dudes. No, no, too easy.
A Mexican, you got a Mexican?"
Give me a place with no free speech,
and I'll tell you, unfunny people.
Russian comedy is--there's a doll, and then you open it,
and then there's a little doll,
and then, wait for it, you open that little doll,
and there's an even smaller doll.
This is highbrow Russian comedy,
is little doll, little doll,
little doll, little doll, right?
And it's funny to them every single time it opens.
There's another little doll,
and they can't get enough, oh, my God.
That's no-free-speech comedy.
- I know what microaggressions are.
It's the latest liberal attack at free speech
and a lot of fun if you do them right.
- The university has a list of stuff
they don't allow speakers to say,
you know, to protect the students.
- From what, ideas?
- Allen is responding to the show's
unexpected cancellation.
Some say the show was axed
because of its portrayal of conservative Christian values.
- If it was a bomb, you could understand,
but the sitcom was ABC's
second-highest-rated comedy this season.
- Isn't it spooky that we're having this discussion?
- Yes. - Yes.
- But we have to have it.
- I understand, but it's just kind of spooky
that it's even a thing that you're even thinking about,
that we have to be modulated,
and I'm a little worried about it,
a little alarmed about things I cannot say.
I do it anyway because the thing I've always loved
about this is it's people, money, and me.
There's no middleman in this.
Essentially, I'm running the show at that moment.
But it is weird that I'm thinking a little bit.
- We as comedians, the whole point
of what we're doing on stage with our words
is to make a point about the absurdities of life.
- Right. - Like, I have a joke about,
you know, being comfortable with my size, you know,
and I say, "It depends on where I'm geographically,
"and if I'm in New York, I'm pleasantly plump.
If I'm in L.A., I'm a beached whale."
I say if I'm in the Midwest, I'm anorexic, and it's awesome.
- Right. - And then I've had someone
come up to me after a show and be like,
"You know, I was bulimic in high school, and--"
- Right. - I'm like, "Okay, calm down.
"That wasn't about you, first of all.
It was a joke, and that's what I'm up here to do."
- How accountable can we be
when you are, in real time, trying to create humor?
And as I explain to people all the time...
the sort of foundation of humor is negative.
So, if you said,
"What do you think of your mother-in-law, Adam?"
And I was on stage and I went, "She's a delight.
Megan's a delight." [laughter]
We're not hearing any laugh.
We're hearing laughs now because we know how absurd.
You are free-forming it,
and you are responsible to the 300 people
who put down 30 bucks to come see you
and want to have a laugh.
- It's way easier to be against something,
but defining what you're for--
- Defining what you're for. What do you want?
What's the point of this?
And I say that because I-- back to comedy--
- To feel good. - I can't do college campuses
because the first couple sentences,
they're going, "Ooh."
Already I've got this image of me, that I said,
"Listen, I've been doing comedy for 32 years,
mostly about men and women."
That's essentially what I've been doing,
and I still have to explain,
"This is a man's perspective."
- I do this joke about...
the way people need to justify their cell phone.
I need to have it with me because people are so important.
- Right. - You know, I said, "Well,
they don't seem very important, the way you scroll through them
like a gay French king, you know, just--"
[laughter and applause]
Well...
- That's very offensive to the gay French kings.
- Well, yeah.
I did this line recently
in front of an audience, and you could--
comedy's where you can kind of feel, like, an opinion,
and they thought,
"What do you mean, gay? What are you talking about, gay?
"What are you saying, gay? What are you doing?
What do you mean?" You know?
And I thought, "Are you kidding me?
I mean, we can't even--"
- [laughs]
- I can imagine a time-- and this is a serious thing.
I can imagine a time where people say,
"Well, that's offensive to suggest
"that a gay person moves their hands in a flourishing motion,
and you now need to apologi--"
I mean, there's a creepy PC thing out there
that really bothers me.
- Kevin Hart has stepped down
from hosting this year's Oscars.
- I swear, man, our world is becoming beyond crazy.
My team calls me, "Oh, my God, Kevin,
the world is upset about tweets you did years ago."
- You have the right to remain silent.
children: Anything you say will be used against you.
Your posts on Facebook, Twitter, and social media
will be saved to shame you.
You can't be funny. You cannot think differently.
You can't challenge us.
We reserve the right to be offended by everything.
You have the right to remain silent.
- It cannot help but be true that
if this is allowed to continue,
that it is going to work its way
into the entire apparatus of government,
journalism, maybe most seriously,
into the tech sector,
which has become the governance apparatus
for the new public square.
YouTube and Google, Facebook and Twitter
dictate whose voices can be heard,
and if those entities start trying
to engineer the conversation
to adhere to the rules laid out
with these phony Trojan horse terms,
disaster will be the result.
- Facebook is a place
where more than a billion people worldwide
come to share their thoughts and feelings.
Sometimes they post content
that's upsetting or insensitive,
and some of those things can make people feel unsafe,
like bullying, hate speech, or violence.
That's why we have global community standards
to decide what and who should be removed.
- ♪ I can't say nothing, nothing ♪
♪ Shut up, shut up, don't want to open my mouth ♪
♪ I can't say nothing, nothing ♪
♪ Shut up, shut up, don't want to open my mouth ♪
- Can you define hate speech?
- Senator, I think that this is a really hard question,
and I think it's one of the reasons
why we struggle with it.
- I'm worried about the psychological categories
around speech.
You used language of safety and protection earlier.
We see this happening on college campuses
all across the country.
It's dangerous.
40% of Americans under age 35 tell pollsters
they think the First Amendment is dangerous
because you might use your freedom
to say something that hurts somebody else's feelings.
- We have a problem, in that our public dialogue
is passing through private servers
where no protections exist.
In other words, if you are not able to access the Internet
in the same way as someone else
because the content of what you are saying
has been deemed unacceptable,
then that shapes the conversation
that we are having with each other.
- PragerU had a billion views last year.
This impact has apparently disturbed
some of the folks at YouTube,
which is owned by Google.
Believe it or not, over 100 Prager University videos
are on the restricted list,
meaning that, in effect,
they are lumped with violence and pornography
as unwatchable by children, libraries, and schools.
So, for example, Churchill,
the man who saved the free world--
Oh, my God, everybody understands
why that'll be on the restricted list.
The Iran nuclear deal. Are you kidding?
That's the modern "Debbie Does Dallas."
It shows you how convoluted their moral compass is
that this would disturb them.
- Among those that are censored include a video
on the Ten Commandments.
The restrictions are purportedly
for blocking things like pornography,
but apparently, in YouTube's world,
talking about the Ten Commandments
is comparable and should be blocked.
- I believe the Ten Commandments video,
for instance, contains references to murder
and, I believe, potentially, Nazism or World War II,
something along those lines, but they're not censored.
They're available to everybody who's using normal YouTube.
They are not available to the small subset
who have chosen to activate restricted mode.
- So I was thinking I have a solution that will,
I think, appeal to Google.
I will re-release it as the nine commandments.
That should solve the problem of including murder
in my discussion of the Ten Commandments.
- I always say when you see someone attacking a subject
by attacking a personality rather than debating the idea,
that's often a sign of a smear campaign.
- I'm very much into classical music.
I periodically conduct, and I've been--
it's been a passion of mine since I was a teenager.
If I sell out the Disney Concert Hall,
it'll be the first time
that a regional orchestra
has ever sold out the Disney Concert Hall.
Every penny is going to the orchestra.
I am not getting a nickel for doing this.
There are players in the orchestra who won't come,
who urge their other players not to go.
"We're not gonna play for a conservative."
Welcome to "The Dennis Prager Show."
My guest is Professor Andrew Apter,
professor of history and anthropology at UCLA,
also a violinist and a member
of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra,
which I am conducting next Wednesday night
at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
He and a couple of other members of the orchestra
have asked people not to attend
and fellow members not to play for me
'cause I'm a hateful bigot.
When you write in your first open letter I have here,
"Please urge your friends not to attend the concert,"
and then you're telling my audience
that you in no way have worked to stop the concert.
Protesting outside doesn't stop the concert.
Telling people not to go to the concert stops the concert.
- No, you could still play
with an empty hall if you want to.
- Okay, well, all right.
- And we know there's plenty of people who are gonna go,
so that's really not the issue.
- It is the issue.
It's really mind-blowing.
They're not going to attend the concert of their own orchestra
to raise funds for their orchestra.
It could be a beautiful story,
music transcends political and social differences,
but they call us haters.
That's the irony. That's really the irony.
- No, we're not. When I was growing up,
and I lived in a tiny little room with my sisters
and the exterminator would come and take care of the roaches,
when I was growing up, I didn't get handed a packet that said,
"Here's your excuse in life. You don't have to do anything.
It's 'cause you're a victim," okay?
I learned that I had to work hard.
I had to stay in school, and I had to study.
I don't need to learn about white privilege.
White privilege is not serving anybody.
This whole idea of the fact--
teaching little kids that their skin color
makes them less fortunate
is not helping black kids get ahead.
There seems to be an ideological war happening,
and the left has built their brand
off of the idea that I am a victim.
- The same people who are covering everything
with bubble wrap
are also telling these people,
"You have a target on your back because you're female.
"You have a target on your back because you're black or Hispanic
or whatever you are,"
and thus, making all the people
they're trying to protect miserable
because of the target they falsely placed
on everyone's back.
- If you're a victim surrounded by predators,
by evil predators, man, you're frozen.
I mean, if you think of an animal
in a situation like that,
the animal's frozen in terror.
One idea is that, well,
you protect people by protecting them.
The other is you embolden them by encouraging them,
and that's a whole different thing,
and it's the right thing, right?
Because you can't protect people.
Life's a fatal disease, right? That's the old joke.
It's a sexually transmissible disease that's 100% fatal.
You're not gonna protect people from that,
and so the best you can do is to make them strong.
- [on TV] Evel Knievel is not hesitating.
Here we go.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- I rode a bike everywhere, never with a helmet.
The thing I found interesting about not wearing a helmet
and crashing all the time--
Because I rode BMX bikes.
I was jumping and doing wheelies.
I never hit my head once,
but because I didn't have protection,
it was all elbows and knees and rolling,
and I actually learned how to fall.
- The goal is not to put yourself in danger,
but the goal is to get more of a sense both of who you are
and of what the world can look like.
- I say never deny the pain.
Just don't let the pain have the last word.
- I would rather my kids have spina bifida
than think of themselves as victims.
I can't think of anything more debilitating
than thinking yourself a victim.
- I do an hour on happiness every week on my radio show,
and I learned something from listeners that startled me,
and that is I am convinced
that a certain percentage of unhappy people
are addicted to being unhappy.
- Absolutely. - I never knew that.
I thought everyone wants to be happy.
- Well, think about how empowering it is
to say your problems
are not because of you, you know what I mean?
You can't get a date, but it has nothing to do with you.
The system's against you.
- The system is stacked against you,
and there isn't a bloody thing you can do about it,
so why bother trying?
Of all the things to tell anyone ever about anything,
that's got to be bottom of the list
unless you really don't like them.
- Here's what our job is as parents, as educators,
as politicians, as cops and lifeguards.
Our job is to convince younger people
they're not victims.
Our job is to say to a kid who is confined to a wheelchair,
"Don't worry.
You're just gonna outwork everybody else.
You're gonna out-hustle everybody else,
and you will see that this thing is not gonna hold you back
because you have the heart of a tiger."
What we're doing now is we're taking able-bodied kids
and convincing them they need to use the handicap ramp.
- I went to Clark Atlanta University,
which is a black college in Atlanta,
and I really wanted to have just open and free dialogue
with as many of the students as possible.
I got a great motto on my radio show--
"I prefer clarity to agreement."
We may not agree, but at least it's important
that we be clear where we differ.
The general belief in American history
has been free speech includes all speech,
including hate speech.
Do you think that should be changed?
- That's hard. That's hard to say because you're really
telling a person that they can't say what they think.
- Right. - Right.
- It's hard to say, but words are powerful,
so people know what they're saying
will invoke some type of emotion.
some type of feeling.
- Right. Should they be allowed to say it?
That's all I'm asking.
I'm talking a legal question, not a moral question.
- I can't legally say that a person
shouldn't be allowed to speak their mind.
- According to polls, 50% of Americans your age
thinks that there shouldn't be free speech for hate speech.
You don't agree with that? - I do not agree with that.
I think if you take away hate speech, you're hiding it.
- Right. That's worse. - So it become worse.
- Mm-hmm. That's an interesting point.
Let me ask you this, 'cause it's generally said...
that a lot of African-Americans think
that this country is essentially racist.
Do you agree with-- do you think this country's
essentially racist?
- I wouldn't say the average white is naturally a racist.
I say it's been embedded with on--
which this nation has been built on.
So, if you think of generation to generation,
think of your ancestors and my ancestors,
the different, you know, grounds which we come from,
you know, ever since my ancestors
were brought here to America, they were slaves.
Your ancestors were slave owners.
So fast-forward generations,
then that privilege, the white privilege
and that oppression that has been,
you know, given within my families, it's still there.
So I wouldn't say it's intentional racism,
but it's more so systematic racism,
a racism that has been developed through generations.
- Okay, just to correct the record,
a vast number of whites in America,
their ancestors were not slave owners.
A, they were either Northerners or they came here later.
I mean, you know, my ancestors in 1863 were in Poland,
and they were not doing very well.
They were Jewish, so... - Got ya, got ya.
- But anyway, just for the record.
Your interactions with non-blacks,
are they largely positive or negative on a day-to-day basis?
- The interactions you will have day-to-day,
they won't be racist, but, you know,
when there's opportunities, you know,
you may not be the first thought.
You may not be the first one to be called.
There's a lot of things that go into why...
things, you know, are the way they are.
- At some point down the road-- I don't know when--
but at some point, we as blacks are going to realize
the degree to which we identify
our aspiration in victimization...
the degree to which we rely on it...
not just as an excuse but as a self-definition.
"Well, I don't know what I want to do with my life,
but I think there's some racism out there."
Well, there very likely is some racism out there.
So what?
Until black America gets to the "so what" place,
we're gonna fall farther and farther behind.
You don't sit still in life, I've discovered.
You go up, or you go down.
- But the thing is, it's another thing
to actually be in the shoes
of those who are being oppressed.
- I don't think anyone in America's oppressed.
You do, obviously, and that's a very big divide.
- After hundreds of years of slavery--
- After hundreds of years of slavery.
- You don't think we've been oppressed?
- No, no, no, you didn't say "have been."
You said "are."
- You think blacks were once oppressed?.
- Oh, of course. It's a given.
- So how do you not think that it's generational?
How do you not think that we're still trying to consciously,
socially still recover from that?
- It takes a long time.
- After telling us that we're not humans--
- Okay, so the oppression is not happening from outside.
It's a residue of the inside.
- Of course, of course, because of what's happened
on the outside.
But the thing is, it's still being placed outside.
- So no matter how whites act,
no matter how kind they might be, it's irrelevant
because you're still oppressed
because of slavery from the 19th century.
- You just answered your own question.
- You may not be physically getting beat, but mentally--
- You answered your own question.
- All right. So, right, well--
- You answered your own question.
- How many generations would it take
for that to end?
- That's a trick question.
- No, no, it's not a trick. Maybe there's no answer.
Maybe we don't know the answer. - Exactly. Exactly.
- Okay, fine. It certainly wasn't meant
as a trick question.
I can't argue with what any given individual feels inside.
- Naturally, 'cause you don't walk in our shoes.
- Right, but you're not walking in white shoes,
but you're ascribing to whites--
- Exactly, 'cause we're the oppressed.
So I don't have to walk in your shoes to tell myself
that I've been oppressed by you.
- In America, you were brutalized.
From birth on, you were whipped, lashed.
Your children was taken from you and sold away.
Your wives were used at the will of the overseer.
I mean, it just was dehumanizing
in every conceivable way,
and for centuries.
So you got a beef.
How long are you gonna ride that beef?
How long do you think it's gonna take?
'Cause the only person who can break that bond is you.
Inside yourself, say, "Well, just because white people
were once racist does not mean I'm gonna sell out my life...
I'm gonna ask less of myself
and claim that I'm being held back by victimization."
And that's what is so startling to me--
the way that you see now of inventing,
reinventing, as I say, the oppression in your mind,
the same oppression that is fading out of the world.
As it fades, you cling and reinvent it, rebuild it,
and so you now become the racist overseer of yourself.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Whether it's victimization,
cultural appropriation, social justice,
or even trigger warnings and safe spaces,
it's all about identity politics,
which is the exact opposite of common sense.
- This country was founded on
we don't give a hoot where you're from.
I know that there were racists in the past.
I'm not talking about Americans as flawed individuals.
I'm talking about the values of the society
were e pluribus unum, from many, one,
and now the other identities are all that matter.
It's astonishing how dividing of people this is,
and that's called wonderful.
That's called progressive.
- Not belonging to a group, to me, is my privilege.
Not having to walk in lockstep with this group
or that group or conform to whatever
whoever the leaders of that group are espousing,
that is my real privilege, to just be an individual.
- The idea of the divine individual, that is the West.
If we subsume that under group identity,
then we will perish painfully,
and God only knows what'll go along with us,
maybe everything.
I mean, look what happened in the 20th century
when people put group identity first.
I mean, how much bloody evidence do you need?
The Communists did it for good reasons,
and the Nazis did it for bad reasons.
Tens of millions of people died horribly as a consequence.
- Is the individual sacrosanct, or is the group?
Do we have freedom to speak what we want to say?
- 58% of Americans hold opinions
that they don't feel comfortable sharing publicly.
- Oh. - Wow.
- Man, oh, man. So I don't believe that this new tyranny,
this new politically correct tyranny
is changing anybody's behavior.
- No. - And it sure as hell isn't
bringing anybody together,
but it's creating an atmosphere of fear and repression,
and you know what happens when that happens.
It's gonna bust.
♪ ♪
- The University of California at Berkeley
is said to be bracing-- that's the quote--
bracing for conservative speaker
Ben Shapiro's upcoming appearance
at their campus.
- Many are comparing to hurricane preparations.
- The barriers are up. Officers are out in force.
- Taking extraordinary security measures
costing around $600,000.
♪ ♪
A large swathe of the campus will be closed off,
including the plaza where the Free Speech Movement began
in the 1960s.
- If Ben Shapiro is not allowed to speak,
the First Amendment will have lost a tremendous battle today,
a very important event in the history of our rights.
- The Constitution is absolutely clear that,
particularly as a public institution,
we cannot and will not discriminate against speakers
because of their perspectives
or because of the beliefs of those who wish to host it.
- There's no free speech for fascists.
Their words are violent,
and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
♪ ♪
- Administration rolls out the red carpet for fascists
to come and spout their white supremacy and xenophobia.
♪ ♪
- And to the dismay of the People's Republic of Berkeley,
you get to see him live.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ben Shapiro!
[cheers and applause]
- He came. He gave his talk, very conservative.
I thought it was a great talk.
I didn't agree with a single thing he said, but who cares?
It was a great, interesting talk.
- The reason that I am here is because fascism
does not own this university
because there are students who do want to hear differing views,
who don't want to be told that they can only hear one view,
who don't believe that the First Amendment should die
under the jackboots and Birkenstocks
of a bunch of anarchist, communist pieces of garbage.
[cheers and applause]
- He gives his talk, and he says afterwards when he's done,
"Everybody who has questions,
line up at the microphones on either side of the auditorium."
- Well, we're gonna do a Q&A after this,
and I love taking questions, my favorite thing,
and I have a rule, which is if you disagree with me,
you raise your hand, and you go to the front of the line
because discussion makes the country better.
- Half the hands go. "Good, come to the front of the line."
I'm like, "Ah, my man."
Guy gets it.
That's what university's supposed to be all about.
- And finally, America is the greatest country
in human history.
You are not a victim.
If you are a victim of something,
you need to show me what you are a victim of,
and I will stand beside you,
but do not blame the freest, most civil society
in the history of Planet Earth
for your failures...
because that's on you.
[applause]
Now, was that so rough?
I mean, did we need $600,000 of security to hear all of that?
♪ ♪
- I think we underestimate the heroism
of our own cause as Americans.
We are trying to do something
that nobody told us is almost impossible.
♪ ♪
If you look at human history,
we've got every kind of human being
ever born in one country,
and we mostly get along.
Nobody points that out.
Where it gets hard...
takes real work.
- I still don't understand what's going on.
Hopefully you can explain it.
Are you testifying in front of Congress?
- I am. - Why are you testifying?
What have you done?
[dynamic music]
♪ ♪
- Thank you. It's an honor to be asked
to speak in front of you all.
First, just a quick piece of business.
Do we get to keep these pads?
[light laughter]
We're talking a lot about the kids,
and I think they're just that, kids.
They grew up dipped in Purell,
playing soccer games where they never kept score,
and watching "Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!"
Studies have shown that if you take people
and you put them in a zero-gravity environment,
like astronauts, they lose muscle mass.
They lose bone density.
We're taking these kids--
in the name of protection, we're putting them
in a zero-gravity environment,
and they're losing muscle mass and bone density.
They need to live in a world that has gravity.
- From helicopter parenting
through safe spaces in colleges,
if that's what you've been exposed to
and therefore you haven't experienced any physical risk,
any emotional risk, any intellectual risk,
of course you are fragile.
How could you be anything but?
- Children are the future,
but we are the present,
and we're the adults.
Could we just bring back order,
and could the faculty and administration
on these campuses
act like adults who are in charge of these kids
who need some gravity in their life?
Thank you.
- Thank you all for your eloquent testimony.
We appreciate that, and, frankly,
I think Congress broke some new ground today,
first reference ever to "Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!"
in a congressional hearing. [laughter]
So there was talk earlier about a speech code.
Seems to me the speech code's
the one that's right behind me, right?
Isn't that the speech code in America,
the First Amendment itself?
Speech code and common sense, as Mr. Carolla's talked about.
- This is about individualism
and fighting for your own capacity
to think and create a society that you want to live in,
not one that's just thrust upon you.
The best thing you can do is sometimes realize
that you have to pick a moment to fight.
- According to the settlement, the $123,000 will go to pay
the legal fees for the U-Dub College Republicans.
- We have reached a settlement deal with them.
We've gotten everything we wanted,
plus our lawyer's fees paid for,
and the school can't charge us security fees anymore.
This is a massive victory for free speech on campus,
and I think it's going to prove to be that way
for not just this campus but other campuses.
- The University of California Berkeley
paid conservative groups $70,000
to settle a free-speech lawsuit.
- This is important not just for conservative students
but for all students,
and one of the things that our clients try to do
is bring important speakers to campus
that they don't usually get to hear from on campus,
and even liberal students benefit from that.
- I prefer clarity to agreement.
These are fellow students of yours,
if you're a student here at Berkeley,
and they are a left of center.
I am right of center, obviously,
and my hope is that we can clarify where we differ.
So, Dave and John, please come out.
[cheers and applause]
- This journey that we've been on--
What has struck home with me
is the fact that there's so many people that are on our side,
that you should be able to share ideas with other human beings
without fear of being fired from your job
or kicked off a campus or shouted down.
- Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with,
you should have an argument with them,
but you shouldn't silence them by saying,
"You can't come because, you know,
I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say."
- I'm wondering, how do you propose
that we as the future of America
can begin to actually fight against these challenges?
- How do we turn the tide, Dennis?
- So the way out...
is start saying what you believe.
I know that sounds so simple.
- There are many, many people out there
who are similarly feeling silenced.
Find courage and speak.
- I really don't regret anything that I said
or anything that I did,
because I know that the names that I've been called
around campus really aren't true
and that they really don't define me
and that I can be and I should be who I am.
And I know that I did the right thing
in love and respect and in truth.
- If you truly are not racist, if you're not a bigot,
if you're not a homophobe
or any of these other nonsensical buzzwords,
if you're none of those things,
you'll realize the water isn't so cold
when you jump into the pool.
- All the good intentions in the world
amount to nothing without one thing.
It is the single most important thing
in doing good on Planet Earth-- courage.
You cannot do good if you are afraid of being attacked,
but the first thing is to decide, "I will be courageous."
[uplifting music]
♪ ♪
- Tonight's concert featuring Dennis Prager
kicked off a couple of hours ago,
but it looks like a planned boycott
of the event has backfired.
I'm told that inside the concert hall
there's not one empty seat.
It's a total sellout.
[cheers and applause]
- It's hard to deal with all that love.
[laughter]
It is, actually. I'm overwhelmed.
Thank you all for coming.
[orchestra playing classical music]
♪ ♪
I've seen the world; I've been abroad
every single year since I was 20.
This uniqueness of America, the "so what"...
So you're a Turk and you're a Jew,
and you're a this and you're a that, it doesn't matter.
Why?
Because we celebrate the human, not the group.
[uplifting music]
- America was built on ideas,
and I built a living for myself talking about ideas.
The only way we separate the good ideas from the bad ideas
is to be free to say whatever we want about them.
We're not all going to agree,
but that's what makes us individuals,
and we can't lose that,
because this car is too much fun to drive.
- America's not perfect.
Liberty's not easy.
It's not always comfortable,
but liberty is the flame
that lights the path of human progress,
and we find our way by raising our voices
in debate and dissent.
For ideas, for disagreement,
for being who you want to be,
America is the true safe space.
[orchestra playing]
♪ ♪
[Dennis Quaid and The Sharks' "Out of the Box"]
♪ ♪
- ♪ I don't care if I have to climb a mountain ♪
♪ Cross a desert or an ocean ♪
♪ I am open to a different point of view ♪
♪ Thinking out of the box ♪
♪ ♪
♪ It don't matter if you're suffering a broken heart ♪
♪ Don't just sit around ♪
♪ Watching your life fall apart ♪
♪ Think out of the box ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Your life is not your own ♪
♪ God owns your very bones, and we all turn to dust ♪
♪ Close your eyes and look inside ♪
♪ Wake up to the wonderful feeling of being alive ♪
♪ And with love in our hearts, joy in our souls ♪
♪ Life's way too short ♪
♪ So let's rock and roll ♪
♪ To the farthest star ♪
♪ Down the deepest, darkest hole ♪
♪ ♪
- I feel the same way about this as I feel about...
terrorism, which is...
Huh, something just--
Oh, there's a bee up there,
just pooped on me, or whatever that thing--
- You have bee poop on you? - I swear to God, I just did.
- I've never been pooped on by a bee.
- Yeah, well, maybe it pollinated me.
- Oh, my goodness.
- You're good. - You got the bee?
- That was great. - That's nice.
- But you realize you cannot say,
"No animal was killed in the making of this film."
[upbeat music]
- ♪ I'll tell you what ♪
♪ I will tell you what, I'll tell you what ♪
♪ I will tell you what, I will tell you what ♪
♪ I'll tell you what ♪ - ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I'll tell you what ♪
- ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I'll tell you what ♪
- ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I will tell you what ♪
♪ I'll tell you what ♪ - ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ Tell you what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I'll tell you what ♪
- ♪ Tell us what ♪ - ♪ I'll tell you what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I'll tell you what ♪
- ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I will tell you what ♪
♪ I'll tell you what ♪ - ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I'll tell you what ♪
- ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I'll tell you what ♪
- ♪ Tell us what ♪
- ♪ I will tell you what, I will tell you ♪
♪ I will tell you, I will tell you what ♪
all: ♪ Say what? ♪
[glass clatters]